The men behind Lost, Fringe, Star Trek and Transformers sit down with Alex Pappademas for an exclusive three-part interview. Click here for Part One and Part Two

Bryan Burk [co-producer, Alias; executive producer, Lost/Fringe/Star Trek]: The challenge Damon and Carlton have—although they've known about this and they've been talking about it for a while—is bringing this to an end. There's a lot on their shoulders.

Alex Kurtzman [writer/executive producer, Alias; co-creator and executive producer, Fringe; co-writer/executive producer, Star Trek]: Oh, my God. An end to a show that's going to be talked about in 50 years, that will be remembered not only for how it started, but how it ended?

Carlton Cuse [executive producer, Lost]: The real challenge is where we hide, when it's over.

Damon Lindelof [co-creator/executive producer, Lost]: It's just—will it be a cautionary tale, or will it be, "This is how to do it right"? When Lost was coming together, all the way through the audit process, focus-grouping, the show that was always referenced was Twin Peaks.

Kurtzman: That's so funny—same with Fringe.

Lindelof: But never as a good thing! It was always a cautionary tale, and what I always wanted to say was, "Twin Peaks had 32 episodes. It's been off the air for seventeen years. And you are so terrified by it that you keep bringing it up!" Twin Peaks' legacy, although they didn't end it well— at the very least, it's a cultural landmark. How many shows get to say that?

Kurtzman: Is that your memory of it, that it ended badly?

Lindelof: That's the way it was referenced, to us.

JJ Abrams [co-creator/executive producer/director, Lost, Fringe and Alias; director/co-writer/executive producer, Star Trek]: [to Lindelof and Cuse] The boldest thing you did was that you forced the hand of the network, to get them to end the show in six years. The fact that you're ending this show on its terms, and not two years after it should have ended—to me, that's the legacy of the show, that's why it will last.

Cuse: I think that's really the lesson of The X-Files and Twin Peaks—but mainly the X-Files. If X-Files had ended after the fifth year, it would have a very different legacy. It was really tainted by those last few years. It's unfortunate, because I think Chris Carter wanted it to go five years, and they were like, "That's fine. You're welcome to leave, but we're going to continue doing the show." And I certainly understand why he would not want to abandon his creation, but, y'know, the show just went on too long. And Lost is also a story. If you're doing Grey's Anatomy, you can do 14 years of it and it doesn't matter—you can always have new characters cycle in and out of the hospital. But Lost is a story, about these people who crash on an island. It has a beginning and it sort of demands an ending. And we were making episodes in the third season of the show, not knowing whether we had to make it last two years or nine years, so we started doing episodes about, like, "How did Jack get his tattoos?" Well, he was flying a kite on a beach in Thailand. We became painfully aware of the limitations of this particular type of show—it needed to end. So that became a critical mission for us. We were incredibly relieved that we were able to work it out with the network. And then the show, we felt, really kicked into another gear—because at that point, we could really map out the mythology with the remaining time we had for telling our story, and it just made all the difference.

Lindelof: We were painfully aware from the word "Go" because, y'know, we'd written this pilot—which, by the way, we didn't sell them, they said "Plane crash on an island, make it work." We wrote it on the fly, and then they said, essentially, "How's the show going to sustain itself? How's it going to continue?" And we were like, "It's not—not forever. You're absolutely right." Eventually, Gilligan and the Professor and those guys—even they got off the island. With the help of the Harlem Globetrotters.

Burk: Did they get off the island? Or did the show just end?

Lindelof: Well, the series was cancelled. Then they did a TV movie in which they get off the island. And then they come back to the island and they build a resort.

GQ: How hard was it to convince the network to let you end it?

Cuse: I think they recognized at a certain point—well, I think it was kind of twofold. We made the argument that the flashbacks were becoming really limiting, and we started making episodes where, y'know, it was apparent from watching the episodes that the flashbacks were really limiting. In the third season, we made what we felt were some subpar episodes, based on the fact that we were just stalling. We had the characters locked in these cages, and I think afterwards, Damon realized that was because we felt locked in cages. And I think at that point, everyone sort of came around and realized, 'Okay, it's better for the show to announce an end date.' It's sort of like JK Rowling saying there were gonna be seven Harry Potter books—by announcing an end date, people understood exactly what their investment was. We're grateful that Steve McPherson and Mark Petowitz [at ABC] were willing to have that conversation, but it was a year-long—well, it was a multi-year conversation, but then the actual negotiation took the better part of the whole third season.

Lindelof: The conversation, for me, personally, started right after the pilot was shot. There would be days when I went to JJ and Bryan—usually in tears, and I'm not saying that to be histrionic—and saying, "Look, there are only so many ideas you can do on the island. There's only so many boar hunts, there's only so many flashbacks that we can do." The idea of needing to generate a narrative every week from this premise was so limiting that it made sense to everybody as a thirteen-episode-and-out miniseries, but doing 24 or 25 a year?